Tag: terminus

“I’ll get Mr. Cameron! He can help.” Partly moved from prostrate to upright so quickly she never heard the Captain croak, “No, wait.”

Partly sprinted around the galley to the pilothouse ladder. A series of four pops and four clangs rang out below deck. The Marcail pitched sharply to a dive as she grabbed a rung with one hand. The deck underfoot became a hill and the ladder overhead an impossible set of monkey bars. For a moment she hung by one hand on the ladder parallel to the Marcail’s deck sharing Captain Munro’s fate, but she caught her toe on the railing next to her. Once she stood to get a second hand on the ladder rung, she also got a better footing on the rail.

Mr. Cameron cursed in the pilothouse above her. She was sure it was one of the few times in his life he’d done so. It was meaningful and brief.

Partly looked down past her feet and past the bow of the Marcail to the trees below. They weren’t coming up—rather they weren’t going down. The Marcail maintained it’s altitude and direction, but it did so bow down and stern up. Then Captain Munro pendulumed into view. Good, Partly thought, she’s still there.

“Mr. Cameron!”

“Just a moment, please,” he replied gently. She heard him grunt and despite clinging to the edge of the ship felt a little embarrassed interrupting his efforts.

“Miss Partly?” Partly manuevered around to see Mr. Cameron had appeared at the doorway at the end of the ladder in what was now the ceiling above her. “I’m going to need your help.”

“Yes, but…” He slightly moved his palm-out hand. She stopped speaking again.

“Is Captain Munro alive?”

“Yes,” Partly said. Mr. Cameron’s steady voice and imperturbable calm warmed a part of her she hadn’t realized had gone cold. She removed one hand from the rung and brushed the grit and chilled sweat on her shorts.

“The Captain and I have drilled for this, so bobbing the Marcail is unexpected but not unplanned. Take a deep breath, please.”

Another shell from the would be raiders burst on the port side of the Marcail. The krunk of stone pellets hammering the hull immediately followed. The Maker’s Marcail rolled to starboard then. Partly heard Mr. Cameron’s curse from behind and Captain Munro’s shrill gasp from below at the same. She thrust her head through the break in the gunwale where the rope ladder hung by one of the two rails; Captain Munro swung at the end of the ladder like a knot or the hanged.

“What happened? Are you OK?” Partly yelled down.

The Captain looked up, but whatever it was she was going to say turned into a gulp of air like a drowning woman. The starkness of indecision pressed Partly’s flattened body further into the deck than she’d already pressed herself and the coursing trees and buildings below became a blurred background to the one-woman tableau clinging to the end of the rope ladder. Reaching out was useless; climbing down was impossible; getting up was abandonment. But just watching was worse Partly thought.

“I’ll get Mr. Cameron! He can help.” Partly moved from prostrate to upright so quickly she never heard the Captain croak, “No, wait.”

Partly sprinted around the galley to the pilothouse ladder. A series of four pops and four clangs rang out below deck. The Marcail pitched sharply to a dive as she grabbed hold of a rung with one hand.

A fleet. Ian’s unveiling a fleet, and I don’t know how to keep up with that. I like that it raises the stakes though. The trouble is that a fleet requires an opposition, and he’s not drawn anything like an opposition yet. Which I suppose gives me the freedom to create one for him—for me at least.

You have a fleet because someone else has a fleet. More accurately, you grow a fleet as your opposition grows their own. Or I suppose you grow a fleet to protect something large in anticipation that others would take it from your control. Stockpiling warships is a symptom of paranoia and planning. Insurance. It depletes a reserve of materials, time, money, and personnel which could have been invested elsewhere building commerce or peace or art.

Maybe the natives of Terminus have a bit more power than I’d first imagined they did. What kind of power might that be? They could control similar ships. They could post a biological fleet of some sort with animals like the honga or maybe nothing so huge, but just numerous.

My thoughts keep drifting to the planet excuse for answering this question of opposition. If I put these guys on a planet in a Star Wars-like universe I could just make this resource of flying material like spice on Dune or some such thing. Make these guys on Terminus the miners of the resource which powers all the hovercraft and speeders in the universe. I think this is the influence of Firefly on my thinking these days.